Black Friday—the day after the US Thanksgiving holiday, when stores throw open their doors early to shoppers hoping to snag an incredible deal—is so-named for being the first day of the year that stores break even and their P&L starts charting out of the red and into the black. And with data revenues struggling at market data sources and distributors, the data industry may need a Black Friday-like event of its own.

Although the global economy is steadily recovering from the financial crisis, the fundamental changes it caused have made life much harder for the data industry: traders laid off during the crisis when their desks became unprofitable meant fewer subscribers to data vendors’ products; so did firms forced into bankruptcy; while those that survived through mergers and acquisitions posed another dilemma for vendors, since merged firms didn’t want to pay the same amount for data as they had previously paid separately, instead trying to consolidate contracts and usage.

Once you’ve navigated that, you still need to navigate the inevitable queues of other savvy consumers who arrived at the same conclusion. Queuing isn’t just frustrating; if you’ve planned an optimal route for your multi-store bargain hunt, then one excessive queue can throw off your schedule, and its entire ability to achieve results. Again, the same is true in the data world, where queuing can hamper multicast data networks, and where insufficient capacity or an underperforming piece of hardware can cause applications to re-request data, clogging networks and impacting other data-consuming applications—something that Rai Technology is addressing with the latest version of its Rai Insight network monitoring tool.

So now you’re prepared to tackle Black Friday shopping, IMD-style. But by focusing on materialistic talk of Black Friday and all the things we want but don’t have, we risk forgetting the day it follows: Thanksgiving, when we give thanks for all that we do have, such as family and friends, and basic amenities such as power, water and a roof over our heads. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, some still lack these. So if you’re a canny Black Friday shopper, please donate some of what you saved to the continuing relief efforts. And if we can apply the same dedication to changing the data industry—not just bargain-hunting—as we do to Black Friday shopping, then perhaps we’ll be able to give it the kick-start it needs.